I just read Daring Fireball’s short so-called « analysis » of
the Opera switch to WebKit. Even I perfectly know that guy is
almost only an Apple PR guy, I’m again surprised by his limited
ability to analyse a situation. The only question that is worth it
is the following one: whatever is the strategic rationale that led
to that choice, it’s obvious Opera had the choice between
open-sourcing Presto to build a larger community around it and
ditching it in favor of an already open-sourced rendering engine.
So why did they choose the latter?

Here’s my piece he’s referring to. Not sure how a single word of it is about Apple at all. Anyway, open-sourcing Presto wouldn’t have solved any of Opera’s problems. Gecko has been open source all along and it too has fallen far behind WebKit. It’s pretty clear why Opera chose to switch to WebKit: WebKit is better, especially on mobile devices, and its lead is growing.

(Also, anyone else get the feeling the Mozilla guys wouldn’t be so worried about a browser engine monoculture if Gecko had won the war?)

Update: Glazman also writes:

And in terms of WebKit better than Presto, well, Opera has always
been a better player with respect to standards than Apple.

In which case, Opera’s involvement with WebKit should help make WebKit even more standards-compliant. I fail to see a problem here.